Release day is here again, and we have two new music packs, as well as a character pack for you to check out! Let’s take a look.

For when you need to bring down the house with your battle music, Murray Atkinson has combined 90s metal with JRPG Battle themes to bring you the Annihilation Music Pack! 14 tracks + 14 alternate no lead guitar tracks, this pack will definitely bring energy to your battles!

Following up from Volume 1, Joel Steudler brings us the Survival Horror Music Mega-Pack Volume 2! 30 more tracks perfect for the zombie apocalypse, with themes for battles, towns, dungeons, and more. Additionally, this pack includes 13 Music Effects, and 30 Sound Effects perfectly crafted for the genre!

Next up, we have the Eberouge Character Pack 1! Bringing the characters of the 90s Japanese Dating Sim to life in your game, this pack features character sprites and art for 20 characters, some with alternate outfits! Also included are 62 item icons and 12 zodiac icons!

Release day has come again, and this week we have two new packs for you!

First up, we have Medieval: High Seas! The newest in the now iconic Medieval line, High Seas takes your game to the water, and to the tropics. With plenty of materials for ships, tropical islands, sea monsters and MORE! Unleash the pirates, ARRRRRRR!

Next up, the Nostalgia Music Box Vol.1. Twenty two tracks composed entirely of the sounds of the music box. Perfect for a flashback, a sentimental moment, a scene of childhood wonder, or perhaps even something a bit macabre.

You had a power outage while saving your project. You shut down your computer to fast. Windows just decided it was the perfect time to do something monumentally dumb.

No matter the reason, the worst has happened: Your project files have become corrupted and now your project is gone forever. Or is it?

First of all, I’m going to give you some advice we share around the community a lot: SAVE OFTEN, BACKUP OFTEN, AND BACKUP IN MULTIPLE PLACES. Copy that project regularly to an external hard drive, to the cloud, you never know when a full hdd failure could eliminate your entire game!

But maybe I’m a bit too late with this advice, maybe you are sitting there going “WELL THANKS, YOU COULD HAVE TOLD ME LAST WEEK” and now you are sitting there with corrupted files.

Luckily, you can still probably save a good bit of your files. To do so do the following.

First, start a new project. Then, backup that new project (you can skip backing up the image and audio folders, mostly you just need backups of the data folders.)

Now, go into your old project files. Pick a single file from it, now copy and paste it to the new project. If you are out of files, go to step 7!

Open the new project in RPG Maker MV.

Did the new project open without throwing an error?? Then repeat steps 2 and 3. Otherwise, go to step 5.

Remove the offending file, replacing it with the new project backup’s if you had overwritten a file in the new project.

Mark the offending file as lost and remove it forever. Then repeat steps 2 and 3.

Congratulations, you have recovered all the files you can!

In general, you should be able to recover almost everything in your game. You may lose your enemy data, or some other large portion of your database. Or you may just lose a single map. You will have some work to do to get everything back, but in the end, you will be much better off than if you had rebuilt everything from scratch.

Release day is here, and we have a unique treat for you this week. Instead of a tileset or a music pack, or sprites, today we are adding a new tool to the RPG Maker Web Store.

Let’s look at Spriter Pro!

Spriter Pro gives you a completely different way to to look at making graphics for your game. Instead of building out in sprite sheets, you can instead put together 2D skeletons and attach parts to animate.

You can then export them to sprite sheets compatible with RPG Maker MV.

Morning everyone, it’s release day! This week, we are focusing up on catching up the various stores on each other. So instead of new releases, we’re going to be releasing packs that were on Steam on the RPG Maker Web store, and packs that were on the RPG Maker Web store on Steam.

First up, let’s look at the RPG Maker Web additions!

Matsurigami slave to convention features 20 songs that range from creepy dreamscapes to dramatic temple ambience to futuristic cyberpunk. With a flair of Asian and Japanese influences, this pack can add spooky or futuristic vibes to your game with ease. You can find it now on RPG Maker Web here.

26 BGMs made to bring an ambient feel of horror and dread to your game can be yours with Horror Soundscapes! Bring the dark and uneasy feeling of your story to life with this pack, now on RPG Maker Web!

And then we have 3 new additions to Steam’s MV DLCs! Karugamo Fantasy BGM Packs 07 and 08 hit Steam, as well as the Medieval Heroes 1 pack!

For your story, you need to know the tone you want to project. Now, you can vary a little bit here. Just because you want to make a serious story doesn’t mean there can’t be jokes, but the jokes need to fit into the whole. Embrace the tone you want for your story! Even if it seems “low class”. If you want to make a campy game, MAKE A CAMPY GAME.

Don’t waffle about it until your entire game is an incoherent mess of tone and storylines.

And the same goes for gameplay. Figure out what you want your gameplay to BE. Is it meant to be simplistic and casual like an early JRPG? Is it meant to be complex and reward mechanics mastery like modern Diablo-clones?

Is there a theme in your gameplay? Are you purposefully playing with scarcity of supplies in order to communicate to the player? Are your mechanics made to emphasize the friendship of your party?

Then make sure that when you are adding mechanics to your game, that they are fitting into the overall plan you have for what your gameplay is!

And on top of making sure that both your story is coherent, and your gameplay is coherent, you also need to make sure that your story and gameplay are coherent with EACH OTHER. If you are emphasizing the friendship of your party in the gameplay, that should also be a part of the story as well.

Everything should revolve around figuring out what your game IS. It’s such a nebulous concept to be honest. But once you grasp onto the identity you want the game to have, a lot of other things will fall into place around it. So find the identity of your game. And make sure that it is designed around that identity.

This week, we have two new music packs for RPG Maker from TK Projects! With 65 new tracks between them, these two packs will add a whole lot of new choices to your game music library!

Built from modern and retro synthesizer sounds, Mystery Music Library Vol.1 is designed to bring the mystery to your game! The pack comes with 35 tracks designed for mystery, horror, futuristic, and modern games, so if that describes one of your projects, this is the music for you!

Next up we have TK Projects Urban Slow Piano Vol.1. 30 beautifully composed emotional slow piano songs designed to instill atmosphere into your game. Inspire feelings of love, sadness, or even despair with these songs in your game.

So, it’s time for the Steam Summer Sale, and that means again that it is a perfect time to pick up MV if you haven’t’ already! It’s 75% off, making it only $20 for those of you using the US dollar.

And while we are on the subject of Steam, it’s a good time to address some of the things Steam automatically does for you with all your games. And how it isn’t necessarily a good thing with RPG Maker.

The thing I’m talking about is the Auto-Update feature. Steam was really designed with video games in mind. And with video games, you almost always want to have your game up to date with the latest bug fixes and content patches. So having it auto-update games in the background for you is excellent!

But with RPG Maker isn’t a game, it is an engine. And there is a good reason most game developers don’t switch engine versions mid-development, unless there is a really good reason to do it. All of their custom coding might break, and that is an issue with MV as well. You could easily end up with various plugins no longer working! The plugin creator may update their plugin, but they may not. And if you need it for your game, you might want to stay on an earlier version. To make sure you have a chance to check out the changes before you run MV, go into the properties for RPG Maker MV on Steam, and in the Update tab, switch it to only update when you start the program!

This is also why we don’t have the editor automatically update your project to the latest version when you load it, you’ll have to handle that part yourself. If you load a project from a different version than the editor you can encounter some WEIRD BEHAVIOR. Always match up your editor and project version. This is a very easy process, but ALWAYS ALWAYS make sure that you back up your project first. You can follow the process below to update your project:

Make a backup of your project.

Double check that backup of your project

Triple check that backup of your project

Create a new project or go to the NewData folder in your RPG Maker MV root (where MV is installed) folder.

Copy the new js files (RPG*.js and Libs Folder) and replace the one in your -old project.

DO NOT COPY plugins.js or it will replace your plugin settings.

Copy index.html files to your current project.

Now after you have everything updated, you can check and see if any of your plugins were broken. If they aren’t, you can continue to use the new version. Just be careful, because some plugin incompatibilities can be hard to spot!

But let’s say you decide to stay on an earlier version to keep compatibility with some of the plugins in your game, or for some other reason. How do you do that in Steam? It’s very easy. We have set up beta branches for the previous release versions of RPG Maker in Steam. To switch to one of the earlier versions, go into the Steam properties for the game, and then go to the Beta tab. There, set it to the version you want. Steam will then set it to that version, and leave it on that version until you decide to change things.

Then, go get the backed up version of your project so that you have a matched project and editor version. REMEMBER IF YOU DON’T WEIRD THINGS CAN HAPPEN!

So, again, be careful with updating. We are working to make the Engine better, but sometimes it just isn’t the right time for an update when you are mid project. And always, always back up your project. We hope you continue to enjoy RPG Maker MV and happy game making!

It’s release day! A continuing from last weeks theme, Karugamo delivers again with two more new fantasy BGM Packs!

Last week, our heroes traveled across fields and through dungeons, with BGM Pack 05, and visited towns and cities with BGM Pack 06, and now, with Karugamo Fantasy BGM Pack 07 we’re adding in the battles. 21 themes ideal for battles, moments of high energy, and darkness.

And for the final new Karugamo Fantasy BGM Pack, number 08, it’s time to fill in all those dramatic scenes. 24 new themes, across a variety of different emotions and tones, to use with all those carefully written scenes in your game!

We also have a bunch of Steam Updates for Time Fantasy packs! Time Fantasy, Time Fantasy Monsters, and Time Fantasy Side-View Animated Battlers are all heading to Steam as RPG Maker MV DLC! Bring out the old school style with these fantastic retro pixel graphics!